So Did Anything Change While We Were Off?
This isn't really an official NERDstats post because this was a bye week. The only adjustments to the NERDstats came from other teams around the Big Ten, not from anything Illinois did over the weekend. There are some slight adjustments based on who we played (Nebraska did X so our win at Nebraska now means Y), but this is almost all "adjustments based on what happened around the Big Ten."
Which means that this article won't be like last week's 6,000-word monster post. This will just be a look at the I-N-I rankings for the Big Ten. Mostly because we dropped a lot.
First disclaimer: don't let that scare you. We did nothing to "deserve" this drop. Remember that the IlliniBoard NERDstat Index is based on poor math to begin with: I'm averaging national rankings, not averaging the things that go into those rankings. It still tells a story, but when you're averaging rankings, you're likely not getting enough information about the separation between the team ranked 31st and the team ranked 45th.
But like I said last week, it's still information. The NERDstats love Indiana and don't love Illinois so far. We've played better opponents, we have a road win over a team the NERDstats like a lot (Nebraska), but still, the four laptops I've chosen for this index love Indiana and are meh on Illinois so far. It's... information.
The reason I'm already pushing the disclaimer button: we didn't play a game last weekend and we fell from 11th in the Big Ten to 14th in the I-N-I rankings.
And I do think it needs to be noted again (because if the NERDstats were showing us the opposite, I'd be screaming it from the rooftops)...
Ranked teams in bold:
- Ohio State
- Oregon
- Penn State
- USC
- Indiana
- Washington
- Michigan
- Iowa
- Nebraska
- Maryland
- Wisconsin
- Minnesota
- Rutgers
- Illinois
- Michigan State
- UCLA
- Northwestern
- Purdue
We fell from 11th to 14th without playing a game simply because Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Rutgers all had "better than the NERDstats expected them to do against their competition" games this past weekend. Wisconsin jumped the most (from 66th to 39th in the SP+ alone simply by dominating Purdue) so take from that what you will. Preseason assumptions still factor in at this point, so the Wisconsin jump can be traced to a fair bit of "that's the team these preseason numbers were expecting to see" going on here.
But we could also look back at this article in December and say "yeah, the NERDstats had us pegged the whole time - this was a 7-5 team all along." And as I've been saying for weeks, I'm perfectly happy with that. If we finish 3-4 (which would be a 7-5 season), that would only be the fourth season this century where we had seven or more regular season wins. I beg; I do not choose.
